A blog by Onkar Kedia. Poems, thoughts on random issues, pictures clicked by me - I dish out whatever I feel like sharing.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

12. Give technology a break occasionally

People have stopped exchanging hand-written letters these days. E-mail and SMS are so easily available, so cheap and so quick that there is hardly any need for exchanging hand-written letters. But can messages exchanged through E-mail and SMS generate as much warmth and intimacy as hand-written ones can do ?When you write a letter to someone, he can feel your presence in the hand-writing. Your hand-writing gives an intimate personal touch to the letter. There are some who can look at the hand-writing and say whether the letter is from a female and if so, what her age is and how beautiful she is.While sometimes their assessment may turn out to be rather flattering, there is no denying the fact that hand-writing conveys a lot about the writer. E-mail and SMS messages have not only painted us with a Times New Roman/Ariel brush, but have also taken away the pleasure of anticipation and wait from our lives to some extent. In our childhood, we used to wait impatiently for letters from our dear ones. We hardly complained about spam or glut of unsolicited messages. The approaching sound of the postman's old bi-cycle used to be like music to our ears. We could hardly wait for him to deliver the mail.All this is now gone. Receiving hand-written letters through post has become a rarity. Post offices these days are associated more with Kisan Vikas Patras and NSCs than with letters from loved ones. People no longer wait for the postman to come and deliver the mail. When he does come, he brings bad news in the shape of credit card, telephone and electricity bills.Technology has done us a lot of good, but like all good things, it has a flip side. While using E-mail and SMS to the hilt, you may surprise your loved ones with occasional hand-written letters unless your hand-writing is so atrocious that they will shudder at the sight of your letter.